The bright future of history.

Reviewed on Macintosh and PC

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August 15, 2013

I founded the United States of America in the year 1760. Well, strictly speaking I forced Spain to do so as a condition of its surrender after its foolish invasion of my French allies. My Russian colonial forces in the New World barely even had to fight, capturing Spanish colonies from Kansas to Guatemala. But my overwhelming success led to difficult choices at the negotiating table; if I were to try to keep all that land, my neighbors would rightfully be wary of my expansionist tendencies. So I weakened the Spanish by forcing them grant independence to the new USA, a Catholic monarchy located in the Carolinas.

What makes Europa Universalis IV special, in a way that most sandbox-style strategy games fail, is that it’s unusually free of annoyances and contradictions that get in the way of enjoying alternate histories. My colonial wars with Russia comprise a perfectly normal set of events in EU4, which lets you take control of any nation on the map, as drawn in the age of the Renaissance and Enlightenment (from 1444 to 1820). From rising empires like France and Russia on one hand, to the Creek in North America, or Ming China, or the merchant republic of Venice, the wide selection provides a solid amount of variety. And because there aren’t any victory conditions apart from a nebulous point system at the end of a game, EU4 is all about self-defined goals within historical settings. It’s mostly liberating, if occasionally lacking in validation when it won’t acknowledge my total domination with a “You Win!” screen.

This is all done at a real-time pace, but it's much less StarCraft than it is Civilization – you'll be slowing, pausing, and accelerating time while making grand strategic decisions about what provinces to target, or where building trade will be most efficient, instead of the tactical choices of most RTS games. The real-time aspect isn’t entirely necessary, but Paradox has been using the system for nearly 15 years now, and it works well enough.

What separates Europa Universalis from most other strategy games is its intense focus on being historical (for example, you can only play on the real-world map). You wouldn't ever expect a game of Civilization to have a historical outcome—its scope is far too broad—but EU4 makes accurate outcomes seem plausible. Could Russia have, perhaps, focused more on western expansion and less on European conquest, as in my game, and would that have led them to more completely colonize the west coast of North America? Those mild initial divergences from history, with major later effects – my world wars against Spain – are the sort of interesting alternate histories that define Europa Universalis.

What makes Europa Universalis IV particularly interesting is how it tries to build plausible alternate histories. Previous games in the series tended to encourage us to follow reality via event systems that ended up making it feel like history was on rails. Events such as civil wars and revolutions still exist in Europa Universalis IV, but they're largely randomized instead of pre-programmed.

Instead, Europa Universalis IV cleverly uses game mechanics to encourage players to behave in ways that keep events within the realm of possibility and reason. For example, a new diplomatic rivals system allows every country to choose three nations to target. Winning battles against those nations will grant more benefits than other nations, so you'll want to attach it to the countries you're most likely to be fighting against. But the rivals mechanic also makes wars more likely, because those countries know you're a rival, and like you less. My Russia started with rivalries against local powers, like Sweden and Crimea, but once I got to the New World, I added Spain to that list, which led to a hundred years of, yes, colonial rivalry occasionally bursting into world wars.

Europa Universalis IV also discourages unrealistic play with penalties. If you try to turn a military advantage into world domination in EU4, you'll start incurring an “aggressive expansion” diplomatic penalty every time you conquer new territory. At one point my Russians had expanded so quickly that not only did my neighbors hate me and form an alliance against me, but the officers in my army kept resigning and my merchants kept getting expelled from their trading posts. At that point I decided that maybe it was time for a few decades of peaceful internal development – and so Europa Universalis was able to successfully head off the typical snowball pattern that turns grand strategy games into a foregone conclusion.

The trade interface looks interesting, but its secrets are difficult to unlock.

The same concepts apply to managing your empire's internal affairs. In perhaps EU4’s smartest move, countries will collect currency in three abstract categories: diplomacy, administration, and military. Those are primarily spent in bulk on technological advances, but they can also be used in smaller doses for shorter-term benefits. For example, if your empire is becoming unstable, you can spend administrative points to stabilize it; or if you need more manpower, you spend gold and military points on barracks and armories. These currencies are so abstract that they detract from the overall historical feel of Europa Universalis IV, but that's relatively minor compared to the major gameplay benefits of encouraging a series of interesting choices. The most interesting of those choices are an “Ideas” system that works parallel to technology and allows customization of different countries – they're what allowed my Russia to be so colony-oriented; in another game the “Ideas” could turn it into a compact merchant superpower with immense diplomatic skill.

This may all sound complicated, and it is to a certain extent; there's definitely a great deal of math going on underneath the surface of Europa Universalis IV. Complication has generally been the chief complaint against the series (and Paradox's other games using the same engine, like Crusader Kings and Victoria) but Europa Universalis IV is better than its predecessors at not being so frightening at first or second glance. Some of that is visual – there aren't very many buttons on the screen, and there’s one big one that leads to almost every decision you'll need to make in just a click or two. But a lot of it is simply better design. Instead of clicking on each individual province in order to decide what to build, you can click on building menu that shows what can be built in each province, as well as their effects – so it takes all of 30 seconds to determine where the best place to add your new tax collector is to make the most possible money.

That's not to say that there aren't still problems of accessibility and complication; several of EU4's systems, like mercantilism and government type, appear to have major effects, but they're buried so far underneath everything else that it's hard to see what they do and how they work (the interface may be a little bit too simple there). And for a game that seems to take pride in showing the mathematical calculations that you should be basing your decisions on, the fairly important trade system is bafflingly obtuse. That's my major complaint with Europa Universalis IV, but given how many moving parts are involved in a game that simulates an entire world, it’s a miracle there’s only one.

The Verdict

Europa Universalis IV is easy to recommend to anyone interested in historical strategy – it’s the best game in the series, which can now take its place, with no caveats, among the giants of the genre. Very few strategy games manage to show the grand sweep of history as something that can be directly influenced and made fun, and only EU4 manages to do it with both a level of complexity that creates historical plausibility and a learning curve gentle enough to be welcoming and satisfying.